Most women experience hot flashes and night sweats either before or during menopause, but a significant minority don't have these symptoms. Could our genes be a factor in determining which women get hot flashes?

Direct microbial sequencing of environmental samples, such as from ocean water, hospital surfaces, and the human gut, have illuminated the vast number of microbes present in our world. However, a microbial species can be ...

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have identified a genetic explanation for a syndrome characterized by multiple frustrating and difficult-to-treat symptoms, including dizziness and lightheadedness, skin flushing ...

Hematology researchers have found that blocking the role of a common protein may offer unexpected benefits for patients with the inherited bleeding disorder hemophilia A. The finding offers potential for developing both gene ...

In the development of obesity and diabetes, signals from the brain play an important role. Here an important neurotransmitter is dopamine. DZD scientists from Tübingen and Munich, together with Swedish and American colleagues, ...

Ludwig II of Bavaria is a particularly striking example of how differently people's internal clocks can tick. Historical sources tell us that the monarch usually carried out his government business at night and slept during ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators have developed a new technique to measure radiation dose levels using gene expression analysis of whole blood from cancer patients receiving targeted ...

Crohn's disease, a common inflammatory disorder of the intestinal tract, can have devastating consequences for a patient's quality of life and is notoriously hard to treat successfully, in part because its course and severity ...

Giving mice a gene mutation linked to eating disorders in people causes feeding and behavior abnormalities similar to symptoms often seen in patients with eating disorders. Only female mice are affected by the gene mutation, ...

Gene

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions " . In common usage, the term gene often refers to what is known more accurately as an allele.

The notion of a gene has evolved with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. All organisms have many genes corresponding to many different biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type or increased risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of basic biochemical processes that comprise life.

In cells, a gene is a portion of DNA that contains both "coding" sequences that determine what the gene does, and "non-coding" sequences that determine when the gene is active (expressed). When a gene is active, the coding and non-coding sequences are copied in a process called transcription, producing an RNA copy of the gene's information. This piece of RNA can then direct the synthesis of proteins via the genetic code. In other cases, the RNA is used directly, for example as part of the ribosome. The molecules resulting from gene expression, whether RNA or protein, are known as gene products, and are responsible for the development and functioning of all living things.

In more technical terms, a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, and is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. The physical development and phenotype of organisms can be thought of as a product of genes interacting with each other and with the environment. A concise definition of a gene, taking into account complex patterns of regulation and transcription, genic conservation and non-coding RNA genes, has been proposed by Gerstein et al.: "A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products".